This guy flew under my radar, my radar being an old cold war model with green bits which I don’t really look at very often. I don’t really understand it. It’s like the worst computer game ever. I’ve got a headset they gave me, but I prefer to sit slumped in my chair facing the other way. Mainly so that when something does appear  - a band, UFO or nuke in the general course of things - I can scramble over, clutch my headset haphazardly to my ears, put my face unreasonably close to the radar, sweat into the green glow and gibber information to my superiors. Because that’s my style. This post is me doing that.

Toro Y Moi is Chaz Bundick to his friends, which are probably innumerable now that he’s released a very nice album Causers of This on carpark records, the home of srs electronic artist Keith Fullerton Whitman, ADD botch-maestro Kid606 and most recently the cultish fluorescent Dan Deacon*.

*A GOOD TIP: Like Dan Deacon you can sellotape a banana to your ipod shuffle. This will make you nearly as good as Dan Deacon and probably more popular in monkey enclosures (although I did see him very well received at Durr a few years back - ZAP).

The title track on Causers takes on the liquid handsoap of R&B balladry, retaining the sensuality while filtering it through Black Moth Super Rainbow’s blurred fuzz prism, massaging it with softly softly micro-house and a dash of Prince.  A cocktail which sounds unlikely until you hear it, then you want to drink it repeatedly until you collapse.  

Much of the record reminds me of that guy Khonnor from a few years back, in that he makes music that sounds like adolescent bedsheets without being disgusting.  Think less encrusted pit, more a morning lover’s face glimpsed through lemonade linen.  He plumbs the geek poetics of HotChip, but ditches the Devo lab-boy schtick, delivering it in a much more loose-limbed fashion, poetic interiority, simplicity over self-deprecating larks.

But while Khonnor emerged at that indie-pop IDM juncture which ran through Teenbeat up to the Postal service, Toro Y Moi are definitely post The Knife ‘Heartbeats’, Friendly Fires and HotChip. If indie disco is a thing, this is an improvement on it - there’s more body than Khonner, even if it is similarly narcotised, wrapped in the softest bedclothes and unlikely to get up before noon. There’s also some bonkers Grange Hill electro squigglery on Low Shoulders which unlike DMX Krew kids TV approach, manages exist with unlikely grace and verve. 

UK readers can jump on Toro’s LP on Spotify, which should give him roughly 0.00002p per listen.  If you like the album the honourable course of action is, as ever, to buy it.

I’ve no idea if blog posts here are going to continue in this fashion, I have to explore the limitations of this cartoon service they call tumblr and see if I can conceive of something that works with it.  But do return, there will more things, and they might even be better. /Post modern blog-bolts chat.

  1. danielbyates posted this